As I mentioned in my new years post, Mr Bee and I are working our way through Jamie Oliver’s 15 minute meals, cooking one recipe each a week. We’re having so much fun. It adds quite an amount of novelty and anticipation to our meals knowing that at least two recipes a week will be completely new to us. And both of us have tried techniques and food that we haven’t cooked before. Mr Bee even ended up making harissa because we were having trouble finding it in the shops!

A selection of our meals so far:

p 156 Seared Asian Tuna. Delicate, sophisticated flavours. My first go at cooking fresh tuna and if it wasn’t so expensive, I’d be eating it at least weekly

p 162 Koh Samui Salad. British cabbages must be tiny because I used the half a cabbage suggested and we ended up with a mountain of cabbage that just diluted the lovely flavours. Since then I have not let the speed of the meal mean that I stopped using the general cooks knowledge, 1/2 a cabbage is a heap and I should have known it would be way too much

p 108 Lamb Kofte. Pistachios and honey on lamb kofte are a taste sensation! I could take or leave the couscous dish though

p 26 Chicken Tikka. Very nice. We had run out of yoghurt when Mr Bee made this so he substituted butter for the sauce. It actually worked quite well in a very rich over the top kind of way

p 232 Ricotta fritters. Very, very yummy. It’s very important to cook the fritters in a nonstick pan as the first batch in the cast-iron stuck like troopers.

p 128 Prawn cocktail. Forget the 70s appetiser. This is tasty and full of fresh flavours. The tomato bread is so easy and tastes divine. Perfect for a hot summers day.

Like this:

Oh this recipe is just soooo delicious. And it’s easy to make, I mean you are actually meant to burn the pork a little 😉 It’s my take on a recipe from this month’s Donna Hay Magazine. It’s completely un-authentic anything but it is scrummy

Crispy pork

400-500 g pork

2.5 cm/ 1 inch fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped

1 anchovy fillet, finely chooped

1 tsp fish sauce

1 tbsp oyster sauce

1/4 cup chilli jam

1 tbsp mild vegetable oil e.g. sunflower

Add everything except the oil to a bowl. Mix well. Cover and place in the fridge for at least 30 min.

Heat the oil in the fry pan on high heat. Add the pork mix and fry for ~12-15 min or until the pork is nice and dry and starting to go a little blackened and caramelised. You’ll need to stir it regularly so it cooks evenly and you only get minimal amount of pork sticking to the frypan base.

Like this:

This summer, much of Australia has been plunged into heatwave after heatwave. It’s been so hot that the Bureau of Meteorology has needed to add extra colours to its temperature graphs to show how high the temperatures are reaching.

And so, to keep our fluids up at Chez Bee, we have been drinking A LOT of a very refreshing twist on home-made lemonade. Maybe you’ll find it refreshing the next time you’re in a heat wave or just want a cool drink on a summers day?

To a large glass add about four thin slices of fresh ginger, 3 or four sprigs of mint, the juice of half a lemon and a heaped teaspoon of honey. Of course, all of these ingredients are too taste so experiment around until you find the right combination for you. Muddle this all in together. You especially want to have the honey well mixed in and the ginger and mint well bruised. Fill up with water and plenty of ice cubes. Enjoy!

How are you? I hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing Christmas-New Year period. At Chez Bee it was all about family, friends and food. Oh and soaking up the way that time seems to slow down and, even though I live in a major city, everything is so quiet and peaceful for a week. Lovely, just lovely.

Of course there was lots of delicious food both at Chez Bee and at other people’s homes we visited. But I was enjoying the company so much that I don’t have many photos to share. Just a couple to give you some idea.

I was also the lucky recipient of a couple of food related presents:

Which brings me to Mr Bee’s and my food resolution for 2013. We eat lovely, healthy and sometimes indulgent food at Chez Bee but hmmm, even the most tasty food can get a bit a “stale” and boring after a while. We both work hard so it’s always a battle to put yummy, tasty and interesting food on the table during the week. As you can see above a lovely person gave me Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals. Mr Bee suggested that we work our way through every recipe in the book, to help us with getting a bit more variety onto our plates mid-week. We’re now into the fourth week of two recipes per week. Of course, as always, Jamie know’s what he’s doing with food. The recipes take a little longer than 15 minutes but they are fast and tasty and we are enjoying ourselves and learning new cooking ideas and tips. I won’t post every meal here just the odd one to let you know how we are going.

Yes the prawn and smoked salmon meals with home-made tartare were delicious but what has me all excited are the quinoa patties. I’ve never cooked with quinoa before and man, were these scrummy. They are a Bill Granger recipe out of the December Delicious magazine (Australian edition). Lemon rind, fetta, mint, parsley and cummin added just the right depth of flavour to the nuttiness of the quinoa. I am a convert. If you’re looking for something to do with quinoa you can try them out for yourself: the recipe is here.